It would be unwise to overstate things, the world being as it is, but what happened in the UK with stuffed peppers is a tragedy. You know the ones I mean: traffic light bell peppers stuffed with a cupboard raid of rice, breadcrumbs, lentils, nuts and veg – 70s stuffed peppers. The kind you might find in a wholefoods cookbook, cheerfully distended and jaunty of cap, with the physiognomy of PC Plod. I used to make them at university sometimes, my sensibilities being, as ever, several decades out of touch. I think I was trying to channel the vegetarian cookbooks my parents once had – in the years before discovering pesto, these peppers were the vegetarian’s lot. The recipes I concocted bore things like buckwheat groats, curly leaf parsley and yeast extract. To this day, I cannot hear “stuffed vegetables” without flashbacks to such peppers and their generous cargo of junk.
It’s a shame, because stuffed vegetables so obviously do not have to be this way. Take chiles rellenos: think about what it takes not just to stuff a poblano, but to blacken it over flame, then to peel off its skin, fill with cheese, secure the seam with a toothpick, coat in flour, dip in fluffy whisked egg, and fry until the batter is crisp and puffed.
